Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [12]
I tried on the entire outfit in front of my mirror, with the head held in the crook of my arm. I could scarcely see myself through the eyeholes, but the dark shape looming in the glass, with two sinister eyeballs staring out balefully from somewhere near the elbow, looked pretty good to me.
On the night itself I groped my way out the door and joined my best friend of the moment, whose name was Annie. Annie had done herself up as Raggedy Ann, complete with a wig of red wool braids. We’d taken flashlights, but Annie had to hold my arm to guide me through the darker patches of the night, which were numerous in the badly lit suburb we were traversing. I should have made the eyeholes bigger.
We went from door to door, shouting, “Shell out! Shell out!” and collecting popcorn balls and candy apples and licorice twists, and the Halloween toffees wrapped in orange and black waxed paper with designs of pumpkins and bats on them of which I was especially fond. I loved the sensation of prowling abroad in the darkness – of being unseen, unknown, potentially terrifying, though all the time retaining, underneath, my own harmless, mundane, and dutiful self.
There was a full moon, I think; there ought to have been one. The air was crisp; there were fallen leaves; jack-o-lanterns burned on the porches, giving off the exciting odour of singed pumpkin. Everything was as I’d imagined it beforehand, though already I felt it slipping away from me. I was too old, that was the problem. Halloween was for little children. I’d grown beyond it, I was looking down on it from my balloon. Now that I’d arrived at the moment I’d planned for, I couldn’t remember why I’d gone to all that trouble.
I was disappointed, too, at the response of the adults who answered the doors. Everyone knew who my friend Annie was portraying – “Raggedy Annie!” they cried with delight, they even got the pun – but to me they said, “And who are you supposed to be?” My cape had a muffling effect, so I often had to repeat the answer twice. “The Headless Horseman.” “The headless what?” Then, “What’s that you’re holding?” they would go on to say. “It’s the head. Of the Headless Horseman.” “Oh yes, I see.” The head would then be admired, though in the overdone way adults had of admiring a thing when they secretly thought it was inept and laughable. It didn’t occur to me that if I’d wanted my costume to be understood immediately I should have chosen something more obvious.
However, there was one member of the audience who’d been suitably impressed. It was my little sister, who hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d made my way through the living room en route to the door. She’d taken one look at the shambling black torso and the big boots and the shiny-haired, frowning, bodiless head, and had begun to scream. She’d screamed and screamed, and hadn’t been reassured when I’d lifted up the cape to show that it was really only me underneath. If anything, that had made it worse.
Do you remember the head?” I ask my sister. We’re in her rackety car, driving over to see our mother, who is now very old, and bedridden, and blind.
My sister doesn’t ask, “What head?” She knows what head. “It looked like a pimp,” she says. “With that greaser hair.” Then she says, “Smart move, Fred.” She talks out loud to other, inferior drivers when she’s driving, a thing she does adroitly. All of the other drivers are named Fred, even the women.
“How do you know what a pimp looks like?”
“You know what I mean.”
“A dead pimp, then,” I say.
“Not completely dead. The eyes followed you around the room like those 3-D Jesuses.”
“They couldn’t have. They were sort of crossed.”
“They did, though. I was afraid of it.”
“You played with it, later,” I say. “When you were older. You used to make it talk.”
“I was afraid of it anyway,” she says. “That’s right, Fred, take the whole road.”
“Maybe I warped you in childhood,” I say.
“Something did,” she says, and laughs.
For a while after that Halloween, the head lived in the trunk room, which contained not only two steamer trunks filled with things